How “Dilbert” Practically Wrote Itself

To mark his contribution to the hallowed halls of management comedy, we profiled Dilbert creator, Scott Adams, in the November 2013 issue of HBR. He was kind enough to lend us his 550-page tome Dilbert 2.0: 20 Years of Dilbert, where he reveals that more than a handful of the comics documented in his legendary workplace strip actually came straight – sometimes verbatim – from his readers’ work-lives, and his own.

Adams started cartooning while working at Pacific Bell Telephone Company (later acquired by AT&T), after being repeatedly passed over for promotion. “The day you realize that your efforts and rewards are not related, it really frees up your calendar,” he says in his book, “I had time for hobbies.” Some of the first Dilbert doodles appeared on the whiteboard in Adams’ cube, and it was one of his coworkers who suggested the name of the title character.

As you may have guessed, the office milieu gave Adams all the material he needed.

In the early days of Dilbert – March 1990, when the strip appeared only in a few newspapers – Adams included a direct quote from a memo written by the then-VP of engineering at Pacific Bell.

Inevitably, an employee of the VP mocked in the strip shared copies with his staff. But because it would be a strike to morale to fire a popular employee for making jokes, Adams insists that his bosses opted for a different management approach.

This, of course, backfired. “The more absurd my job got, the funnier my comics became,” the cartoonist mentions in the book. Adams’ boss once sent him to a budget meeting in his place, where he told the meeting leader point-blank that slashing the budget wouldn’t matter “because my project wasn’t terribly important.” The project wasn’t funded, but the experience inspired this cartoon:

Adams also recounts that he sat in on pretty much the exact meeting below. “I played the part of Dilbert,” he says.

Sometimes he didn’t even have to write any text himself – the following slogan was taken verbatim from a company mission statement:

In the book, Adams reports that “many of the suggestions I get from readers start with, ‘A coworker of mine has this annoying habit.’ No matter how random or obscure that habit is, I always feel like I know that person too.” Like the colleague he calls “the Topper”:

Then there’s the ruthless HR director, who deals lethal blows with a smile:

Or that employee whose sick-day excuses are just barely passing:

Yup, we’ve all been there. And, of course, that’s where Dilbert’s appeal comes from. Scott Adams just made the humdrum funny, and without much exaggeration. “People who haven’t experienced the corporate world surely think I make up this stuff,” he says. But, as those who have been soothed by Dilbert’s workplace satire over the years know: Management truth can be stranger – and funnier – than management fiction.